A new way of being critical?

The Metropolitan is currently showing an enormous (228 works, 14 galleries) exhibition 'The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art'.

Rather than being curated by chronology, theme or schools of painters, the show presents the Met's entire holding of Dutch painting in the order that the collection was assembled:

from the founding purchase of 1871, to the major gifts and bequests of the 1880s through the 1940s, and finally to the strategic accessions of the 1950s onward. Reflecting how the Museum's great collection of Dutch paintings is closely linked with the institution's history, the installation outlines how the collection was formed, following the taste for Dutch art in America and among New York's great collectors.

While it might not work for a casual or targeted visitor (who wants, for example, a greatest hits, or to see all the Metsu's together) I find this approach fascinating. Imagine applying it to the Christchurch Art Gallery's collection of Canterbury painting, and seeing who was being bought when, by whom, and how.

Responding to the potential difficulties of the hang, New York Times critic Holland Cotter has assembled a mighty how-to-visit guide for the exhibition:

The major complication is in the show’s shape. The paintings are arranged by the date they entered the museum’s collection, not by artist or genre or city of origin. So tracking down a particular Rembrandt portrait, or all five Vermeers, or a compare-and-contrast array of floral still lifes, requires some footwork.

You’ll customize your own tour. But if it’s any help, I’ve mapped mine out. My goals were to find something of everything and to balance the familiar with the seldom seen.

Cotter provides descriptions of 13 works. These have also been turned into a multi-media guide, with images, gallery layouts and audio of the written texts (narrated by Cotter), which is well worth checking out. The audio can also be downloaded to provide a audio-tour that you can take when you go to see the show.

This wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary if it was done by the Met. But I'm astounded that a critic has gone to such effort for his readers - it's a really different approach to the role of the critic.

Note: original story via Ed Winkleman. And I'd be interested to know if Cotter worked with the Met to produce this.

Image: Pieter Claesz (1597/98-1660), Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Oil on wood. 24.1 x 35.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image from the Met website.

Guggenheim @ NGV: highs, lows, and distressed attendants

Last week in Melbourne I went to see the Guggenheim exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Created just for the NGV, the show had all the hallmarks of a blockbuster: extensive (somewhat baffling) advertising campaign, sizeable ($20) entry charge, bags of merchandise and a mixed selection of works.

My best moment in the show was seeing Maurizio Cattelan's We are the Revolution. Placed at the end of a narrow corridor which was blocked off from the rest of the final gallery, I laughed out loud when I rounded the corner and saw it (no on else did though, so maybe I'm the weirdo). It's fantastic - the slump of the shoulders, the quirk of the eyebrows, the nap of the suit.



There were some other things that were fantastic to see in all their painterly fleshiness: like Lucio Fontana's exquisite Concetto spaziale, Attese (the NGV also had a beautiful Fontana on display in their contemporary international collection gallery)



and Ellsworth Kelly's Dark Blue Curve.



Both of these are the kind of painting that do nothing in reproduction, and everything when you get to stand in front of them. And standing in front of works was quite easy - although there were crowds of people, a preponderance of audio guides meant viewers tended to stand well back from the work they were listening too, and the guards were being fairly relaxed (although more on that shortly).

Part of the reason that the guards were being laid back was that the majority of the paintings in the first room of the show - the Pollock, the Frankenthaler et al - were inside glazed frames. This was okay for the mini Pollock, but the bigger paintings were just ruined. Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 was almost impossible to view unless you were nose-to-frame with it: standing back to try to take in the whole work equated to watching 20-odd people reflected against a cream and black background.




And the two glazed Agnes Martin paintings just died on the walls, which was such a shame.



Apart from the Cattelan, my most enjoyable time in the show was spent watching the antics of the poor attendant patrolling the thin white line that surrounded Ann Hamilton's between taxonomy and communion, a long table covered with iron oxide powder and approximately 14,000 human and animal teeth.


The people actually looking at the table were very careful. The barrier line was barely noticeable, however, meaning that people passing the work to get to other parts of the exhibition tended to step over it. At which time, the attendant would streak after them and reprimand them. When she wasn't running after accidental interlopers, she was hovering anxiously and craning her neck around to spot infringements, like a chicken on speed.

Although it had some definite highpoints, the Guggenheim show was overall a disappointment - somewhat incoherent and inelegantly displayed, especially when compared to the smaller, well-chosen and beautifully hung works in the permanent collection.

Images:

Maurizio Cattelan, We are the Revolution (La Rivoluzione siamo noi) 2000. Polyester resin figure, felt suit, and metal coat rack, ed. 3/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese 1965. Water-based paint on canvas. 130 x 97 cm.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Blue Curve, 1995. Oil on canvas. 46 x 190 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, Easter Day, 1971. Acrylic with pencil and charcoal on canvas, 82 x 114 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Agnes Gund, 1984.

Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Anonymous gift, 1963.

Ann Hamilton, between taxonomy and communion 1990. Steel table, iron oxide powder, and approximately 14,000 human and animal teeth. 78.7 x 487.7 x 137.2 cm (table). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Ginny Williams in honor of the artist, 2004.

Christchurch Art Gallery's podcasts

I'm a web editor in a cultural institution. One of my jobs is to drum up new content for our website. And one of the easiest ways of doing that is to take things that are already happening, or already exist, and re-purpose them for online delivery.

Christchurch Art Gallery have just done a really nice job of this by putting their audioguide online. They recently commissioned a new audioguide, which covers 21 works from their permanent collection hang, and is narrated by actor Sam Neill.

Christchurch Art Gallery audioguide download page

When you visit the Gallery, you can hire an iPod loaded up with the audioguide to take with you - so far, so traditional. But by putting the audio online (with an easy interface), the Gallery has made it possible for people to listen to the guide on their computer, or download it to their own iPod (etc).

It's a small but effective thing. Each track is only a few minutes long, and you can see the work being discussed as you listen. I could see these being really useful in a classroom, where students could listen and discuss - or make their own for other works. And in a nice touch, they've also made the transcripts available for download as PDFs.

As far as I know the Christchurch Art Gallery is the first to make podcasts available for collection works, so good on them. Apparently, there's more still to come.

Image: Rita Angus, Cass, c.1936. Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. One of the works featured on the audioguide.

Declaration: I was commissioned by the Gallery to produce the script for the audioguide.